The Task

I recently had a task for users to easily copy information displayed in a Gridview, then paste it into another application. They only needed a few pieces of information from the GridView to be copied. I searched Google for some quick code that I could plug in and make it possible. I quickly found some solutions, but, they only worked for Internet Explorer. That’s a problem because my customer only uses Google Chrome. I tested what I thought were the top 5 of the solutions, but I could not get them to work with Google Chrome, I did eventually solve the problem, but, it was easy 10+ hours later with trial and error. I thought my solution might help others, so here goes.

The HTML Page

In my ASPX page I added a LinkButton and a Hidden field inside my GridView’s TemplateField where I also had my existing checkbox to make a row selection. I placed the LinkButton just below it so it would be easy for the user’s to click right away and not have to scroll right, just click, go to their other application and paste. Just a note about security, there is a security issue because you really don’t want a website you visit to have control of your computers clipboard (where the information is temporarily stored during a copy and paste). For that reason a user interaction has to be performed (in this case a LinkButton), which signals that the operation is OK to do.

Now the Codebehind…

First I’ll start with my “GatherCB” function, so you can see how I assembled the data that I’m going to copy to the clipboard, then the actual function that copies the text from the LinkButton, this code is vb, but you can easily convert it to c# with an online converter there is one available from telerix here.

That’s it, a cool and simple way, it works with most browsers. Need something unique for your business computing? Give me a call 972.571.4808.

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